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August Schleicher ( February 19, 1821 - December 6, 1868) was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language.
August Schleicher was born in Meiningen ( Duchy Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of Weimar in the Thuringian Forest).
He began his career studying theology and Indo-European, especially Slavic languages. Influenced by HegelGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ( August 27, 1770 November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Wurttemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. He received his education at the Tubinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Wurttemberg, he formed the theory that a languageAs with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition; however, most would agree that language is a system of communication or reasoning using representation along with metaphor and some manner of logical grammar. Many langua is an organismIn biology and ecology, an organism is a living being. The origin of life and the relationships between its major lineages are controversial. Two main grades may be distinguished, the prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The prokaryotes are generally considered to, with periods of development, maturity, and decline. In 1850Events January 4 The first American ice-skating club is formed ( Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). January 29 Henry Clay introduces the Compromise of 1850 to the United States Congress February 28 University of Utah opens in Salt Lake City, Utah March 7 United Schleicher completed a monograph systematically describing the languages of EuropeMost of the many indigenous languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. The scope of this article also includes languages spoken outside of continental Europe that linguistically belong to European language families (such as Afrikaans, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Übersicht (The languages of Europe in systematic perspective). He explicitly represented languages as perfectly natural organisms that could most conveniently be described using terms drawn from biologyBiology studies the variety of life clockwise from top-left E. coli tree fern, gazelle, Goliath beetle Biology is the science of life. It is concerned with the characteristics and behaviors of organisms, how species and individuals come into existence, an e.g., genusSee genus (mathematics) for the use of the term in mathematics. See genus (music) for the use of the term in music. In biology, a genus (plural genera is a grouping in the classification of living organisms having one or more related and morphologically s, speciesThis article discusses biological species. Also see combinatorial species for the mathematical meaning of the term. Species is also a movie by Roger Donaldson. In English "species" is both singular and plural. The word " specie" is unrelated and is used t, and variety. Schleicher claimed that he himself had been convinced of the natural descent and competition of languages before he had read Darwin’s Origin of Species. He invented a system of language classification that resembled a botanical taxonomy, tracing groups of related languages and arranging them in a genealogical tree. His model, the Stammbaumtheorie (family-tree theory), was a major development in the study of Indo-European languages. He first introduced a graphic representation of a Stammbaum in articles published in 1853. By the time of the publication of his Deutsche Sprache ( German language) ( 1860) he had begun to use trees to illustrate language descent. Schleicher is commonly recognized as the first linguist to portray language development using the figure of a tree. For the most part, however, Darwin’s ideas simply overlaid the fundamental features of Schleicher’s prior evolutionary project, which derived from the work of those individuals immersed in German romanticism and idealism especially Humboldt and Hegel. August Schleicher died from tuberculosis in age of 47 in Jena (Duchy Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Thuringia).
